Reevely: For Mayor Watson, the easiest way to address a tough problem is to do nothing at all

Mayor Jim Watson is against a safe-injection site, photo radar, ranked ballots and bans on corporate campaign donations, and studying whether it should cost you to drive into downtown at busy times.

All these positions are the easier ones for a politician to hold, readily defended with single-sentence arguments that are simple and wrong. A whole lot of people who might previously have thought of Watson as a progressive sort are finding out what it’s like to argue with a cube of Jell-O.

For instance, the mayor opposes plans by the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre to open a small safe-injection site for needle-drug users at its Rideau Street offices. “I believe the scarce dollars we do have should be going to treatment of people who have addictions, whether they’re alcohol or drug addictions,” Watson says.

The centre’s Rob Boyd figures the safe-injection facility would cost $250,000 to $300,000 a year. That doesn’t buy very much treatment.

Serious research suggests that Vancouver’s larger safe-injection site saves the health system an average of $480,000 a year. In any event, if a Sandy Hill safe-injection site prevents one case of dirty-needle HIV, it pays for itself. If it prevents two, it frees up money that can be used for that treatment program that is not available now.

Has Watson been to Vancouver’s safe-injection site? Yes. What did he think of it? He didn’t answer that, talking about what a depressing place the Downtown Eastside is. Thank goodness Ottawa’s drug addicts are less visible, right?

Let’s go on.

Watson’s against using photo radar to enforce speed limits because he didn’t run on the idea in 2014. City council agendas are full of things Watson didn’t promise to do in 2014, such as redesigning all the regulations governing taxis. “There’ll probably be some desire to look at how technology is affecting the taxi industry,” he said when he was running for re-election then. Not exactly a promise of the mass deregulation he voted for last week.

We could pick our spots. We could set radar cameras to catch only people going much too fast. We could decide we want to try other things first. Or, like our mayor, we could be against asking the province even to give us the option because we haven’t been for them in the past.

When some councillors wanted to write a letter to the province asking for the same right to restrict union and corporate donations to local election campaigns as Toronto has, Watson rejected it. He didn’t want to bug one minister when Ottawa was also looking for money for light-rail and sewer projects from other ministers.

Didn’t Watson slash a city program that gave rebates for individual contributions? Why, yes.

In the same field, Watson’s against ranked ballots in municipal elections. “When I go into the ballot box, I want to vote for my first choice and I want my first choice to win, not my second or third choice,” he says.

Filling in preferences is “watering down (your) vote,” he says, which is plainly false. Ranked ballots mean last-place finishers get cut and their supporters’ next choices counted, until somebody gets 50 per cent of the vote or more. The point is that even if your favourite candidate isn’t widely popular, your preferences among the rest still matter. They make individual voters’ choices more important, not less.

As for congestion pricing, that’s the dumbest and saddest of all. Capital Coun. David Chernushenko wanted city staff to look at other places that use it and think about whether it could be any help here. Then council’s transportation committee turned the proposal into a study of the causes of congestion generally. Then Watson, with the majority of council, voted against doing it, because we’ve totally got a handle on that already.

It’s a remarkable set of opinions, all on the side of knowing less and not giving ourselves tools for attacking complicated problems.

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